“WINNING the election is a good-news, bad-news kind of thing. Okay, now you’re the mayor. The bad news is, now you’re the mayor.”
Dirty Harry himself, Clint Eastwood, said that. And as he also so eloquently put it, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well do ya, punk?”
A good question indeed.
Now that we know we will be voting for our Directly Elected Mayor next June, the next question is: Who is feeling lucky, and downright cuckoo, enough to take the helm and steer us away from the ill-boding rocks that are closing in around us on all sides?
Would you fancy a pop yourself? Do you feel lucky, punk? I mean, for an annual salary of €130,000, you’d be an absolute eejit to turn your nose up at it.
I, myself, am currently in the process of putting a team together for my own campaign, which I’ll tell you more about anon. Seriously, you’d want to be a few sandwiches short of a picnic not to be thinking about it. For one thing, it would beat working for a living!
Though there’s a few names already being bandied about and rumours aplenty, so you would want to get plotting fairly pronto.
Now, a couple of the names being whispered about by those in the know have raised a few eyebrows. I think maybe some of these likely lads fancy their shot at the top spot much more than it might fancy them.
Still, you have to love a dreamer, and shur, if you’re not in, you can’t win.
But would they not do away with the auld polling booths altogether and go for something more primitive and more befitting the top dog position on offer?
Cage fighting is all the rage these days. Even Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are doing it!
You could have John Moran and Frankie Daly pummelling seven shades out of each other in the octagon, as well as Elisa O’Donovan going at it hammer and tongs with Maria Byrne.
The auld cage fighting could bring an element of pizzazz to proceedings and maybe it could be staged up outside Colbert Station or on the new and improved O’Connell Street. It might even bring a few punters into the town. The bit of business wouldn’t go astray. We need more than rugby museums and opera centres. Notions, I tell you!
The last guy or gal standing then gets to sit in the corner in the big Directly Elected Mayor hat. It could be a much fairer way of deciding things, especially when you consider that the one who gets the gig will have the keys to city and all its jam jars.
See, it’s that kind of outside the box mindset we’re after. And a number one vote in Mellor’s box will see plenty more of where that came from. Your only man!
